Page 44 of Love, Nemesis (Ocean to Ashes #2)

Lethe stood still beside Cal, and he could feel the boy’s tension and horror. Lethe turned toward him but Cal nearly leapt back, drawing his Atlas, visibly terrified by the sights around him.

“Emma,” Lethe said, keeping his eyes on Cal as if he might run off into the flames. “Can you see the door?”

Emma calmly scanned the base of the Grin through the fire. “I see it,” she said.

Lethe turned to see Cal with his eyes still intent, his Atlas drawn.

“Think about what you’re doing, Cal,” Lethe said firmly.

“Don’t,” Cal said, raising his voice. He searched the area around them. It transformed slowly into a marsh of ash and human remains as the oil from the bodies congealed in the water. “Don’t!” Cal demanded louder when Lethe didn’t reply.

Lethe extended his hand. “Put the Atlas down and listen to me. I’m not your enemy. We’re too far to lose. Put your weapon down. Ivan Rowe is so close.”

Cal just stared at him.

“Cal.”

The boy looked around at the devastation. “You burned everyone,” he said hopelessly. “It wasn’t just the Strike…you burned all of the civilians. You did anything you had just to win. Is that even…human?”

“No,” Lethe replied sharply. “It was wrong. And maybe there wasn’t a right choice, but Cal, I didn’t see one. That could be a fault of mine. I don’t deny it. We couldn’t risk anyone getting out, not even ourselves.”

Lethe couldn’t tell if Cal was accepting his answer. He looked past him to Emma, who watched them both calmly.

“Cal,” she said, nearing him and placing a hand on his shoulder. She pulled him into her chest as he shook. “It’s a horrible thing he did,” she said, tearing up now.

Seeing her tears, Cal softened. Emma stroked his hair.

“But he did it for people like you,” she whispered, resting her cheek on Cal’s head so that Lethe couldn’t see her face.

Emma had always hated the very notion of the burning.

She had protested it to the end. Even now, she said the words for Lethe’s sake alone.

She’s just a memory , Lethe reminded himself as the intensity of his old guilt welled up in him in her presence.

He’d never wanted Emma to see the Burning of the Strike.

His best parts through Emma and worst parts through the Burning combined in one memory felt like blasphemy, and he had to resist the urge to turn away from them both.

The death of so many was a horrific victory, but they’d made a commitment.

They’d sworn to erase the Strike and everything they’d touched from the face of the earth.

That had included the ROSE. They hadn’t excluded themselves, knowing that if they were to destroy the lives of so many, they would do it only at the cost of their own.

It was the only way to contain any memories of them, memories that many Strike might be able to use, even beyond death.

At the time, it had seemed like the fairest price.

In Emma’s eyes, under her gaze, none of it seemed that way. He felt like two beings more than he ever had, unable to consolidate these vastly different parts of himself. In his own self hatred, he also hated her. She’d been his saint, and in the end had become his monster.

Cal put his Atlas away, and Emma took his hand as she started toward the doors. Lethe followed through the scene until she stood before the Bleeding Grin. She released Cal’s hand as she approached it.

There was an impression of a hand on the doors, visible by the firelight. Emma lifted a hand, filling the impression as her fingers darkened to black.

Cal watched the scene in horror, stumbling away from Emma as the doors opened and she drew her hand to her chest. She looked over at Cal, showing him her fingers.

“It’s okay, see?” she said and the blackness faded.

“It was just a Strike’s hand for a moment—not my hand.

A mutation I have, you see?” She continued to show Cal her hand until he calmed down.

She stepped aside, opening the path for the inside of the Bleeding Grin.

“Go on,” she said to them both.

Lethe waited near Cal.

Cal looked up at him.

“Go on,” Lethe said. “I need a moment.”

Cal nodded warily, looking between them as he backed into the building, seemingly relieved to escape the carnage outside.

Lethe looked down at Emma, her hands held up near her chest. She looked directly into his eyes.

“You were wrong,” Lethe said to her. “I became exactly what I thought I would without you. You shouldn’t have believed in me like you did.”

She didn’t look out at the carnage to see the evidence; she looked directly at him as if none of it fazed her.

“What more proof do you need, Emma?” he asked.

She remained silent.

“Say something,” he demanded.

“Don’t you dare pick this fight with me now,” she barked coldly, fury now on her face.

“You’re just a memory,” he snapped back.

“Exactly. And how you treat me makes all the difference,” she argued. “Look at me. Right now.”

He forced his attention to settle fully on her.

“You set out to do something. We all did. Don’t you dare, Lethe,” Emma said firmly. “Don’t you dare lose focus. You never asked permission from anyone else to do what you wanted, and you aren’t going to get it from me.”

He held her eyes, absorbing the words. He nodded once and her expression softened.

“Let me see your hands,” she said softly, and he hesitated. “Let me see them,” she pushed.

He removed his gloves, showing them to her.

She checked the fingertips. Finding nothing, she just held them.

“We should have talked about it more than we did,” she said, looking up at him.

She held one of his hands in hers. “I should have been more willing to talk about it. I should have listened. You always wanted to be one of them, didn’t you?

A Strike. You fall in and out of love with things so fast. The Riders were just a temporary fix for you.

I saw that. When they caught me, I knew it then. They kill me, right?”

Lethe looked away.

“Lethe,” she said, steering him toward her. “Please know that I wanted to die quickly. Please know that I wasn’t trying to hold on.”

Lethe’s expression faltered.

“I don’t want them to use me against you. The idea of that, that’s the real torture,” she said. “If you were trying to save me…you didn’t fail—don’t think that for a second. I’m going to make—I made my own choice. I needed to let go so that you didn’t hold on, do you understand?”

Lethe searched her eyes and opened his mouth to say something.

“And listen.” She raised her voice, cutting him off.

“The fact that you’re standing here right now and you’re still human is proof that everything I did or didn’t do was worth it.

If they kept hurting me, you would have done anything to stop them.

I might have lived, but you’d be a Strike and then what was it all for?

You would have slipped into The Eating Ocean and sold it all on a whim. ”

Neither of them spoke. Lethe listened to the city burning.

He was lying to her.

No.

He was lying to himself.

Emma was dead. This was nothing but him having a discussion inside his own head.

“You didn’t die quickly,” he corrected. “You suffered until you couldn’t any longer. But they didn’t kill you.”

Her brows furrowed. She opened her mouth to speak, but he interrupted her again, forcing the words out.

“You turned into so many different people, over and over again as if each new person would be an escape from the pain.” he said, “Eventually, you changed into something that couldn’t feel the pain you felt.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered, searching his eyes frantically. “Who did I change into?”

The silence lingered. She swallowed, lowering her head. She twisted her hands in front of her, growing progressively nervous.

“The only person that ever could have set you free from that lab,” Lethe answered.

“You transformed into one of the Strike, and then you lost control. You couldn’t stop yourself from changing and you were in so much pain.

You lashed out at everything and everyone.

You killed several of the other prisoners, and even a couple of the Strike. ”

She looked out at the chaos around them, tears welling up in her eyes. Lethe refused to look away, bracing himself in the face of the truth as it settled in the passing minutes.

“You nearly killed a slave girl, a young one, and that’s what finally started to bring you back. You took the dying girl and ran off, leaving me behind. In the final hours of the Burning, it took everything I had left to fight you back.”

“Everything you had,” she exhaled, and then her eyes flashed to his. She grabbed his hands again, inspecting them. She looked him in the eyes.

“Snake Bite?” she asked, but he knew she already had her answer.

Her hands withdrew from him.

“I did this to you?” She backed away. She turned, stretching her arms out to the fire.

“I helped do this?” she exclaimed. “Me?” She gestured to her chest. “I—” Her voice broke.

“I died in such a horrible way?” She began to pace back and forth.

Her skin fluttered with color as she changed into someone Lethe didn’t recognize.

She kept pacing, longer and longer, until her foot stepped off the path and into coals.

She seemed to ignore the sensation of heat on her bare feet, each step bringing with it another version of herself.

He watched Emma pace, seemingly oblivious to him now. She argued with herself. “There has to be a better way,” she said passionately, her speech pressured with urgency. “Even—even if we can’t see one. Even if the other way is just having faith that there is another way!”

She walked off the path again, into the coals, farther each time as he backed away into the dark of the Bleeding Grin.

“Even if the other way is just having faith!” she shouted, walking farther and farther across the burning landscape.

Lethe placed his gloves back on his hands as he walked through the doorway. He glanced back a final time.

Love. He remembered love. He’d loved her, but he did not tell her the whole truth.

He didn’t tell her that in the end, she’d comforted the suffering girl through the pain.

He didn’t tell her that in the end, she’d found Ana, and even in the insanity of her last moments, had managed to offer the girl hope.

Emma Shepherd’s dark silhouette was stark against the burning city beyond. She walked through the marsh of devastation, an angel of madness in a field of embers, whispering to herself.

Love failed Emma Shepherd, because in the end, he’d walked into the Eating Ocean to never experience that feeling again.

Lethe hadn’t tried to console her memory.

He turned and walked into the Bleeding Grin.

She was a figment of his imagination, now nothing more than a memorial of his silent rage.